


Rust and Stardust

by xtinethepirate



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Brothers, Coda, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-16 03:38:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18513127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xtinethepirate/pseuds/xtinethepirate
Summary: The purple light of the infinity stone ripped through the ship and the last of its people, scattering them through space. But Thor did not die. Ice formed across his skin, and that great heart grew slow and cold, but it did not fail. He did not die.“Show-off,” Loki told him.





	Rust and Stardust

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this a year ago, after seeing _Infinity War_. In my head, and in scraps and pieces in a notebook, this is just the prologue to a long, fix-it-y kind of fic (one that definitely involves Loki and Erik Lehnsherr smooching). But those several thousand words never really coalesced into something fic-shaped, and the _Endgame_ deadline loometh; for now, this piece can kind of stand on its own as a coda, rather than an intro.

_And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,  
And the rest is rust and stardust._

Well. That was embarrassing. 

Not the dying—though that was certainly less than ideal, in and of itself. For gods, death came in a wide variety of forms from “immortalized in passable verse” to “downright inconvenient,” and only very rarely did it stick. 

No, it was not the act of dying itself that stung the pride, no matter how much he would have preferred to leave his neck un-wrung. It was the _how_ of it that rankled—Loki had outsmarted far better beings than Thanos, beings that were assuredly smarter and more dangerous, too. Mischief, well-conceived and brilliant enacted, was an art; it was his raison-d’être. It was quick-tongued and sidewinding, and above all, _clever_. 

What it was _not_ was conjuring a too-short blade after too few mealy-mouthed pledges of fealty. It had been pathetically transparent, as attempts went. Frankly, on the other side of things, Loki felt he’d deserved a good throttling.

“I had the tesseract in my hands,” he said aloud without a voice, in the vague direction of his brother, ignoring the ongoing dramatics and toeing with no foot at the sad crumpled heap that had been his body. “I could very easily have whisked myself away—” snapping one’s fingers proved unsatisfying without having fingers, and Loki sighed. Incorporeality lacked a certain...panache. “I’m sure you would have managed.”

When he finally managed to tear his eyes way from his own remains to look back at Thor, his brother was bound, gagged, and glowering. A...surprisingly familiar sight in their mutual history, if he was honest. Loki smiled crookedly and spread his hands, with little more than a slight ripple in the world. So much for goodness and heroism and other him-forsaken ideals. 

“Love is a dangerous thing, brother. I could have used the space stone. You could have electrified the ship and everyone in it. Now look where our morals have left us. No one saved the worlds without a little bit of selfishness, some _self-preservation._ ”

Thor didn’t respond. Thor, of course, could not hear him. The lecture was entirely for an audience of one. The lesson likely was as well. Loyal, pig-headed, not-terribly-bright Thor wouldn’t have listened to him anyway. 

“That’s why you were always the hero,” be confided. Might as well, since the fool couldn’t hear him anyway. (Still, when Thor looked up with such intensity—a fleeting hope—). 

Nothing. Not so much as a pinprick spark of static electricity, and Thor’s glare was all frustrated fury, perhaps at a brother’s not-entirely-unprecedented betrayal. Certainly, there was no rending of garments or gnashing of teeth in evidence. The former could be explained by the thick bands of ex-spaceship, constraining any physical outpouring of grief, and, all right, the metal gag might well have hid any evidence of the latter, but it was the principle of the thing. A little effort would not have gone amiss. 

“Better hero, but completely lacking any sense of occasion. This would play _terribly_ on stage, you know.”

Thor didn’t—couldn’t—respond. He certainly wouldn’t write an epic for Loki, even if he did survive (even if he knew how to hold a pen). He’d given his grief for his false brother years ago and planets away; he had said himself that there was nothing but indifference left. 

There was a rising flare of purple light that pulled Loki back out of his self-pity. He blinked and glanced back over his shoulder briefly. _Ah._ Soon he’d be able to voice his indignation in person, so to speak. 

“I wonder,” he drawled, moving behind Thor and trailing phantom fingers across his cheek, “if ‘get help’ might have worked better this time?” He kissed Thor’s burning skin as the purple light swallowed the ship and tore everything apart. 

*

Energy, time, and believe: that was what made a god. 

Now, that wasn’t a very romantic store, any any skáld worth having in one’s hall would spin a tale of runes and the norns and the winding branches of the world tree. And maybe, _maybe_ some of that was true. But a god without belief was just a man with an overblown sense of himself, really. And a god that over-extended himself when already near (or past) death would never reach Valhalla. He might not even be claimed by Hel, but instead be reduced to fragmented shadows. 

The purple light of the infinity stone ripped through the ship and the last of its people, scattering them through space. But Thor did not die. Ice formed across his skin, and that great heart grew slow and cold, but it did not fail. He did not die.

“Show-off,” Loki told him, with, yes, a bit of bitterness. To meet so mundane an end as being strangled by a jumped-up megalomaniac, only to have his brother survive a spaceship explosion and the depths of space—it was simply one more variation on the motif of their youth. Life had not been terribly fair; he had expected more from death. Still, there was no escaping the inevitable, even if his brother did make him wait.

Well, let him have his final joke at Loki’s expense. “Those muscles of yours will be meaningless shortly, brother; then we may have to have a reckoning about some incidents from our childhood.” Loki laid back among the debris and drifting bodies and crossed his arms behind his head, anticipation making him almost jovial. What fun they might have, once Thor was freed from _duty_ and _honour_ and _the throne of Asgard_ and, ahem, _protecting Earth from alien invasions_. If he’d still had lungs, he might have whistled.

Life, however, remained not terribly fair.

There was a _ship_ , suddenly and without warning, scattering bodies and ship fragments. Not timely enough to do anything to help beyond adding a certain level of irony to the occasion—not that the crumbling rust-bucket of metal would have been much use beyond canon fodder. Now it picked its way slowly through the wreckage as though searching for something. A crow on a battlefield, scavenging for eyeballs. Thor had always had... _opinions_ about the corpse-robbers that stitched themselves along the tattered edges of a war. Thundery opinions; they offended his sense of honour. 

Loki smiled. 

“Well, much as I was ready to throw flowers and compose poetry about our reunion, brother, this seems...well, rather more _fun_.” The heartbeat was slowing, a guttering candle flame in a gale, but he had to time this properly. He kept an eye on the ship, tracking its progress. “And frankly, I suspect you’d make an insufferably boring ghost.”

Close enough. 

“Give him hell for me,” he said, and immediately winced. _That_ was all he could muster for his final words? Too bad, no time. “Have a bard fix that,” he added hastily, pulling all his magic—all of him _self_ that remained—into his hands, until the stars were no longer visible through them. They sparked with green fire, even as ice began to form across the skin and turn it Jotun blue. And he _pushed_ Thor, as hard as he could, as his being unravelled entirely. 

The last thing he saw, before he was nothing more than stardust, was Thor slamming into the ship’s cockpit and sliding along it like a squashed insect. Among the floating debris, for a moment, there was an echo of laughter.

*

For a while after that, there was nothing.


End file.
